Friday, March 1, 2013

Symbolism Essay

The Dark, Dying Death
Author's Note: This essay is for my goal for idea development.

     The cold, bitter death; its feeling sweeps through everything. The awful feeling of not knowing what to do or say when death comes. When someone dies, part of you dies too. Wait, they left something behind, something dark behind. In the books Fever and Thirteen Reasons Why, the people who die leave something dark behind, as a reminder of their awful death.
      What the dead leave behind is the black liquid. It splatters everywhere, and even when the body is removed, it's still there. Waiting till it is scrubbed away. But how can you remove black from a white sheet? You can't. The death is always lingering. In Fever, this is actually what happens when yellow fever spreads. Thousands of souls leave behind their mark. It even smells of death, as described by the book.Emotions are left too. Mourning and misery leave Philadelphia in a ghostly gloom. The memories, like the black liquid, can not be scrubbed completely away. Mattie remembers some of the people who passed away in the fever, including her heroic grandfather. By just remembering these people, it makes them impossible to forget.
      A girl who killed herself leaves tapes. All have a story, one on each side. Tapes look sort of eerie, black and mysterious. You never know what you're going to hear until you press play. In Thirteen Reasons Why, Hannah Baker makes these tapes right before her death. They are passed around to people on Hannah's list, and when Clay listens to them, the words can never be erased. Like the black liquid, they probably will never be completely scrubbed away. But these tapes have a meaning, not just to make people suffer. To remember. To know why she left. To know what she had been thinking all this time. I mean, if you kill yourself, you wouldn't want people saying "Yeah, that girl was just plain crazy." No, you want them to understand through the dark tapes. Clay understand completely; during that one night, he is listening, regretting, crying, shaking, vomiting. Remembering. As the feeling goes through, he understand all the mistakes he made by not helping this girl feel....alive. So when she is dead, he follows her dead footprints around town to feel her there. To imagine her there. To remember her there.
      Both Fever and Thirteen Reasons Why have awful deaths that occur. That shouldn't have occurred. But in a way, the dead find a way to keep moving on. To be remembered and never be erased. Remembered by  their dark death. Even the people who survived the fever or listened to a dead girl's tapes still feel the suffering of those that have passed. They are never erased, but the people impacted by this still find a way to keep going on. They find a way to get past the dark, dying death.

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